Jeff Metcalfe: A dozen moments from my 12th Olympics

SOCHI -- In honor of my 12th Olympics, here are a dozen moment from the Sochi Winter Games that stand out to me, in no particular order except No. 1:

When the U.S. women's hockey team won the go__ ... hold that, now it's 2-1 over Canada on a deflection off an American but the puck is sliding, sliding, sliding toward the open net for the clincher ... hold that, it bounces off the post, but still leading with a minute to go ... hold that, Canada scores again off a loose puck in front of the goal ... overtime, U.S. has some chances then some penalties, turning a power play into a 4-on-3 for Canada and sure enough ... when the U.S. women's hockey team somehow ended up with silver instead of gold.

The 1998 U.S. women's hockey win when the sport made its Olympic debut was among my Winter highlights from Nagano, right behind Tara Lipinski's figure skating stunner and talking to Lipinski's mother about the moment later that night.

But women's hockey is tops for me here because of the way it went down and that Lyndsey Fry of Chandler was the U.S. team. It's been a genuine pleasure working with Lyndsey and her parents, much like it was with Breeja Larson and her family in London.

Moving on to the rest of my dozen, big and small but meaningful to me.

• The time I was riding on a gondola to the Extreme Park with Rachel Axon and Lindsay Jones of USA Today Sports and two others. Where are you from, I politely asked? California, she said. And Hawaii for the other. Wow, Hawaii, you get the record for traveling furthest.

Then I caught the name on the Californian's credential ... Julia Mancuso, who mentioned she was on her day off. So how dumb do I feel that I don't even recognize the super combined bronze medalist, her fourth medal overall over three consecutive Olympics.

Sorry I didn't recognize you, I said, although I had the feeling she would have been just as happy had I not noticed her name. Mancuso, by the way, lives and trains in Maui when she's not skiing therefore explaining her friend from Hawaii.

Still today (Tuesday after closing ceremony, my final day here) I can't shake the feeling that I'm living on a movie set posing as Rosa Khutor ski resort. Almost nothing was built here 18 months ago, I'm told by those who saw first hand, and what's here now has a surreal and unsustainable feel to it as if 18 months from now it might all be gone.

I was at the Olympic Park in Adler four times: on the day of opening ceremony to interview former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, to talk with Fry and her parents, for the gold-medal women's hockey game and for the closing ceremony. The rest I was in the mountains, away from the scent of figure skating scandal and not suffering through short track speed skating in the post-Apolo Ohno era.

Life was good, which is not to lord anything over those suffering for various reasons in the coastal cluster. There was not a single issue with my housing and even have a small washing machine in my apartment, food with a few exceptions at some venues was good -- I had salmon multiple times after zero at previous Olympics, breakfast at Park Inn was yummy -- and as the Mzymta River flowing through Rosa Khutor filled up with snow melt so did late-night options from the Golden Tulip, Royal Bar (with the lighted beer deer in front), Modus Pizza, O'Hara Alpine Pub (think Tilted Kilt) or worst case 24-hour McDonald's.

Transportation was reliable and especially good when gondola travel is involved. So yes I missed figure skating some and would have more had Max Aaron qualified, but the late switch that put me in the mountains turned out to be a huge positive.

• The small world. I'm always struck by this at every Olympics. Like when I'm talking to Napolitano at a fancy resort next to the Black Sea after our previous conversations being at a Phoenix Mercury or Arizona State women's basketball game.

Or being on the same plane with Joseph Kruzich from Moscow to Sochi after meeting the press attache to the U.S. embassy in Moscow a few weeks earlier at Camelback Inn in Scottsdale (thanks Dewey Schade for the introduction).

Greg Harney and I have run in the same circles at Arizona State and the Olympics for years and suddenly we're having lunch in the Caucasus Mountains, talking about the book he wants to write and what he believes to be the greatest day in ASU athletics history in March 1977.

Fry and I met in person for the first time last summer at Arcadia Ice Arena in Phoenix. Now, she's taking the time to talk to me after the most agonizing loss of her life at the Bolshoy Ice Dome.

One day Republic photographer Rob Schumacher and I are on the press truck covering P.F. Chang's Rock 'n' Roll Arizona Marathon. The next, we're eating overpriced pizza at a Russian ski resort on a night we somehow both end up off early together, one of the few times that's happened in all the Olympics we've worked.

It's a bit surreal if you pause to consider it.

• In part because of the events I covered that I've never done before. Hello biathlon, my latest example of how it's easy to fall for an unfamiliar sport when you see it contested in person at the highest level. This has happened to me before with track cycling, women's field hockey and other Summer Olympic sports and certainly did with curling in Vancouver. Now biathlon (shooting/cross country skiing) is on that list thanks in part to some record U.S. performances, though non-medal, by Susan Dunklee and Lowell Bailey.

Coming back to the mountains on a bus after the closing ceremony, I had a long conversation with the brother of Chad Salmela, at his fourth Games as NBC's biathlon/cross country analyst. Apparently, according to Cory Salmela, Chad was a big hit with Jim Bell, NBC Olympics executive producer, and so was the sport.I get the attraction now and why the sport is so popular in Europe. It's mesmerizing almost to watch the shooting and hear the crowd reaction over a miss that requires skiing a penalty loop or in relays using extra shots. Dunklee, for example, skied well enough to challenge for the first ever U.S. medal in the sport but wasn't quite at that level in her shooting.

• Mistakes at a minimum. The kind that can personally make or break how you're feeling over three long, non-stop work weeks.

You know about me being snowed in for a night in New York, on the day after the Super Bowl, coming to Russia. That led to cancellation of my return flights per Aeroflot rules so I knew before getting to Sochi that I wouldn't be leaving until three days after the closing ceremony. My luggage, of course given the New York issues, did not arrive with me, somewhat taking away from the pleasure of flying business-class from Moscow to Sochi because of the rescheduling. They've got it good up there, I must say.

So I wore the same clothes Monday-Wednesday and planned to go shopping for others on the Thursday before opening ceremony when surprise I went to the apartment office and found that overnight my luggage had been found and delivered. So I was without my albeit limited wardrobe -- I stuffed everything into one large suitcase -- for less than 12 hours after arriving, much better than others had it.

I did leave a nice pair of gloves on a bus that never showed up in any lost/found. So after some debate, I purchased a pair of Sochi 2014 souvenir mittens to make do that can be given away as a souvenir to some fortunate relative. A good decision.

There were the requisite laptop problems that were mitigated by me working at these Games for USA Today Sports rather than azcentral sports solely as I do at Summer Olympics. Being part of a larger team includes the kind of IT support you would sometimes kill for (aka when Michael Johnson was running his record-setting 200-meter in Atlanta).

I can't thank Lou Barone enough for patiently helping me to essentially make the laptop stress go away by setting me with another machine while he fixed mine. And making sure everything is backed up in case mine needs to be wiped clean once I return. I didn't miss any assignments due to this or get stuck on deadline with an unresponsive laptop or lose any critical information or photos, all of which have happened in the past.

There were other disasters averted: I left my winter jacket on a chair at JFK Airport after getting a flight from New York to Moscow rebooked but was able to talk my way back through security and found it. Late in the Olympics at biathlon, I realized I was without my phone before starting down the gondola, went back and found it on the floor. I came down with a cold after covering nordic combined all day in the rain, but it never progressed beyond congestion and ears being plugged up on almost every gondola ride.

• The medal moments. I covered events in which the U.S. won eight of its 28 medals including the women's hockey heartbreaker vs. Canada.

Three of those were in bobsled including the silver for Elana Meyers and Lauryn Williams, who trained in Phoenix last spring at World Athletics Center. I interviewed Stuart McMillan, WAC performance director and U.S. Bobsled starts coach, at Paradise Valley Community College track in October when he told me Meyers is "probably the best female athlete I've ever seen and the strongest by a long shot."

To be present when the training pays off with a medal is rewarding even for a reporter. That's when covering Olympic sports more than in the few weeks before the Games pays off and even more so in the case of athletes going to more than one Olympics like Kerri Strug in 1992 and '96 and hopefully Breeja Larson in 2012 and '16. Then you truly begin to understand the journey required by the extended family to create a timeless moment like Strug's in Atlanta or Misty Hyman's in Sydney and can put it in proper context.

Others I saw medal at the Sochi Games: Kaitlyn Farrington and Kelly Clark in women's snowboard halfpipe; Noelle Pikus-Pace in women's skeleton; Steven Holcomb and his teammates in 4-man bobsled; Hannah Kearney in moguls; and Jamie Greubel and Aja Evans in women's bobsled.

I was standing directly in front of Farrington's parents in the mixed zone at Extreme Park when she pulled off her admitted upset win over Clark, Hannah Teter and Australian Torah Bright. Nothing really quite matches that real-time reaction, especially when you learn later the back story of Gary Farrington selling cattle off his ranch in Idaho to help pay for her travel expenses.

Here's some of the exchange between reporters and Farrington immediately after her final run held up for first:

Did you think she was going to get a gold medal coming here?

"Uh, no. But we she knew she had the possibility. She has the tricks, she had them all in her bag. She can do anything. And look what just happened."

"A good day at the office," chimes in Farrington's mother Suz Locke.

Gary: "I've been shaking all over. I just stopped shaking.

"We love Kelly (Clark). We love all those girls. We have this (sign) for Torah and (Australian) Steph Magiros and everybody we know well. But something very, very special just happened. My phone is vibrating so hard. It hasn't stopped. I thought it was me."

You feel privileged just to be listening in to those conversations, much less reporting on them.

• The non-medal (or lesser medal than expected) moments, which sometimes supersede the medalists in emotion and poignancy.

Four stood out most for me: Katie Uhlaender taking fourth in moguls and skeleton; Lindsey Jacobellis falling in the snowboard cross semifinals; and Keri Herman refusing to let her 10th-place finish in ski slopestyle ruin her Olympics.

"We're trying to do our gnarliest tricks," in slushy snow not meant for that, Herman said. "But that happens. You've got to just work with the hand you're dealt and apparently I got dealt the joker. You win some, you lose some. I feel like I still won."

Kearney, a defending gold medalist, was the polar opposite, crying in the mixed zone and through to the press conference after Canadian sisters Justine and Chloe Dufour-Lapointe dropped her to a bronze medal. Yet the Dartmouth graduate was insightful even in the midst of her agony. I asked if given her gold in 2010 she was surprised by the intensity of her reaction to a bronze.

"You don't prepare for this moment," Kearney said. "You visualize and prepare for success. I knew that if I didn't win a gold, I was going to be very disappointed because it probably meant I did something incorrectly. I didn't ski the best run of my life, which is exactly what I was planning on doing. But life as everyone knows does not always go according to plan. Usually there is a reason and you learn from it. So despite my outpouring of emotion right now -- I'm sorry, I'm a girl, whoo -- and I worked really hard these last four years -- whoo -- it's definitely a very big letdown. But probably even tomorrow morning I'm going to feel a lot better about this event, and I will start planning the next chapter of my life."

Whoo is what I was feeling after that, and no I didn't intend to make her cry more.

• Working for USA Today Sports around talented reporters such as my roommates -- Will Leitch and Chris Strauss -- my friend from Des Moines Bryce Miller, who I wrote about in an earlier blog and others I didn't know personally before like Axon, Jones and Jeff Zillgitt. They were fun to be around working and afterwards, late/late at night at the Golden Tulip.

Leitch, founding editor of the sports blog Deadspin, and I share the same alma mater, University of Illinois, but had never met before so it felt somewhat collegiate to be thrown together for three weeks in a quasi dorm-like atmosphere for what was his first Olympics.

• The closing ceremony. Like in London, I missed opening ceremony -- the special tickets needed are hard to come by -- but made it to closing. That paid off handsomely in 2012 with, even minus the Stones, felt like a soundtrack of my life. Sochi closing was less of a party and more like opening ceremony part II with the pianos, Bolshoi ballet, 12 writers and even circus segment. Still being there to watch with my friend Amy Rosewater -- we go back in Olympics coverage to 1996 -- and take in the fireworks afterwards made it among my favorite moments.

We tried to get something to eat afterwards at a European restaurant near the Main Press Center and were thoroughly nyet'ed by a mean-looking Russian waiter who wanted to nothing to do with answering questions, let alone serving. That actually was the exception for me -- most Russians I dealt with, Olympic volunteers or not, were quite willing to help whether they spoke English or not -- but this guy (who could have landed a part in Rocky IV) apparently treated all Americans the same, which is to say like this.

• The days after. It was supposed to be just one extra but became two when Aeroflot cancelled my return flights because I didn't make all my outbound flights, due to the snow in New York that the Super Bowl luckily escaped.

This took pressure off during the Olympics to squeeze in a trip to Sochi since the city itself is a 45-minute train ride from the Olympic Park in Adler, not to mention the additional hour travel time from the mountains. But covering the Sochi Olympics without actually going to Sochi seems ridiculous, and the timing worked out on the day after the closing ceremony to go there with seven reporter friends, only one of whom I believe had made it there previously.

It was well worth the effort to get a feel for the seaport city where Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin built his summer home in 1937. We didn't have enough time to visit Stalin's villa to see his wax figure in the cinema room and instead wound our way to the Black Sea, where the line to get into the Olympic souvenir super store was way too long to justify the wait.

So before shopping in nearby stores, we tried to have lunch at a restaurant called Christopher Columbus that seemed perfect when we were seated on the patio with a nice view of the water.

Too bad we didn't know that to get served would take longer than the five weeks Columbus needed to for his first voyage to America. This first was explained as the grill not working although there was no good explanation for the lack of drinks or bread or the salads we eventually ordered once learning about the grill.

Eventually we cut our losses, left without eating and went to Subway, leaving time to spend more than we probably should have on nesting dolls and the like.

A day later, mostly on my own because everyone else had already left, I went running for the first time while in Russia and ate dinner at O'Hara's Alpine Pub, something akin to Tilted Kilt.

Sochi reminds me somewhat of Barcelona, still No. 1 on my Olympic list, a tad ahead of London. Where does Sochi fall? Not that high for me in part because of my preference for the Summer Games and good fortune to have been to some spectacuar locations. However on the exceeding expectations scale, Sochi is near the top along with Athens.

Cliff jumping at Hydra Island off Athens on my birthday remains my best Olympic day after with Sochi probably second because of the company and in spite of the already funny Columbus sinking. (For the record, I spent 10 days in San Sebastian and Madrid after the Barcelona Olympics, mostly with my friend Julie Loyarte, who speaks Spanish and has relatives there. That wins hands down for overall post-Olympics experience).

• The real world. It's never far away even inside the Olympic bubble. On the final Friday of the Sochi Games, my assignment at biathlon expanded to include a story for USA Today about Ukraine winning a women's relay gold medal -- the second ever winter for that former Soviet republic -- at the same time of political upheaval that then had left 70 dead in protests against the Ukrainian government.

We know now, of course, that the Olympic flame was barely exstinguished when Russia sent troops to Ukraine's Crimean peninsula to protect its interests, escalating tensions with the United States.

My lasting memory of this will be of Sergey Bubka, the great pole vaulter and now president of Ukraine's Olympic committee, flitting in and out of the press conference room at the Laura Center to talk with small groups of reporters about the government opposition he supports, the gold medal and how they interconnect.

"I have heart and I have soul," Bubka said. "Even we are here, but we don't feel easy. When it was announced that the girls won, all the Parliament stand up," while the Ukrainian anthem played. "It's the best message for the people. For me, this is positive and good message for better future together."

The Sochi Olympics began with looking back at the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan -- juxtaposed against the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks -- and ended with Russian troops mounting an invasion of sorts and the threat of a war that could split Ukraine into two states.

I always feel uplifted about the human condition to some degree at the Olympics, but when the afterglow is so short -- and the Games although blessedly safe come at the insanely high cost of more than $50 billion, more than any Summer Games -- it's hard to feel truly happy about the whole endeavor.

Yet the roughly nine months combined I've spent at 12 Olympics probably gives me more hope for mankind than anything else in my lifetime. Imperfect yes, frivolous perhaps, but so much better than most of the alternative ways countries find to interact.